At the long-awaited launch of the federal Office of Religious Freedom, I found myself, the child of a Dutch migrant, standing next to a gentleman from Pakistan, both of us surrounded by a multitude of faiths. As I looked around at the faith communities gathered at the Ahmadiyya Muslim centre in suburban Toronto, I saw Canada. Not Canada as the soft, colourful, romanticized ideal of multiculturalism, but Canada as a vibrant, functioning reality of genuine pluralism. And I saw something else. I saw suffering. Virtually every group on hand to welcome Andrew Bennett as Canada’s new ambassador-at-large for religious freedom is connected, in some way, to adherents elsewhere in the world who are made to suffer purely because of their religious beliefs. Suffering has become my shadow companion since last summer when my 15-year-old son drowned. Standing beside the gentleman from Pakistan, I could not help wondering how my suffering would increase if my son’s life had been taken from us not in a terrible accident, but from a bomb thrown through the window of our church, from blows suffered while imprisoned for reciting the wrong creed in a private apartment, from the myriad of means used daily outside Canada to harass and intimidate and, yes, exterminate religious believers. From that perspective, the name given to the new entity by the Conservative government is something of a misnomer. Ambassador Bennett’s large role will be the promotion of religious freedom. But before freedom can flourish, suffering must be staunched. Before it can be staunched, it must be itemized, publicized and vigorously, relentlessly condemned. Dr. Bennett is a man of principle.  He has the character and deep caring for humanity to suit the role of a diplomat.  (Full disclosure, Andrew and I are personal friends.) However, Ambassador Bennett “holds” the office of ambassador. He is not the office.  Ambassador Bennett will first need the commitment of his own department.  This will require a newfounded curiosity and care for religion and understanding of its place in our world.  As well, Bennett will need the support of the commons – and the House of Commons. Enter Canada. Proceeding from the charity that is at the heart of our country’s formative Judeo-Christian faith, we have achieved the reality of a vibrant, genuine pluralism and therefore have an international duty to speak out against the suffering that is inherent to religious oppression around the globe. We have found the way for Catholics, Protestants, Buddhists, Muslims and all others to gather peaceably for a significant political event. If we do not speak for that spirit, who will? There is an attractive argument that says religious minorities are hardly the only victims of suffering, and therefore should not be privileged above women or homosexuals or child soldiers or the hungry or all others on the horrifying roster of victims of global inhumanity. The argument is attractive because it is, by and large, true. It is a mug’s game to abstractedly triage political responses to the world’s pain. Granting that, it is also true that where oppression arises, it invariably makes its earliest target the freedom to believe, to worship, to know God as one chooses. Prime Minister Harper put this well in his speech announcing Ambassador Bennett’s appointment: “Democracy cannot find fertile ground in any society where notions of the freedom of personal conscience and faith are not permitted.” The prime minister noted that Canada’s own Bill of Rights, the forerunner to our cherished Charter of Rights and Freedoms, emerged from former Prime Minister John Diefenbaker’s conviction that to be Canadian is to be free to worship, to stand for what is right, to oppose what is believed wrong, and to choose how one will be governed. Such freedom is, in Diefenbaker’s words, the heritage Canadians must pledge to uphold for each other and “for all mankind." Critics of the new Office of Religious Freedom tend to miss the “for all mankind” part. They miss it most frequently because they continue to inhabit a world where secularism has conquered all, spiritual life has been driven entirely into the private domain, and religious faith of all forms has been debunked as non-operative superstition. It’s a world that has nothing to do with the one that exists. In every corner of the world, including Canada, religious belief remains as vital as bread and water to the daily lives of millions. Canada’s key difference is that we are a genuinely pluralist country where a Dutch immigrant can stand beside a Christian from Pakistan watching a Ukrainian Catholic being welcomed by Buddhist monks in saffron robes and Muslim women in hijabs. If we balk at spending a mere $5 million from a $2.6 billion budget for the Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade to help make our peaceful state possible in the rest of the world, how willingly will we respond to other forms of global suffering? The answer will tell us what we really stand for as Canadians.

Sean Reid of the Federal and Ontario Progressive Contractors Association of Canada talks with AM570 News about the findings in the Cardus Construction Competitiveness Brief. According to the report, the Carpenters Union bid to certify the Waterloo Region could cost taxpayers $78 million. To listen to the discussion, click here.

Director of Media Services, Peter Stockland interviews Janet Epp Buckingham, Cardus Senior Fellow and associate professor at Trinity Western University. Janet attended the announcement naming Canada's new ambassador for the Office of Religious Freedom, in this interview originally found on the Cardus Daily Blog. Janet discusses her thoughts on the new office and ambassador.  To read the interview, click here.

Cardus President Michael Van Pelt is quoted in Embassy's article on the newly appointed Office of Religious Freedom Ambassador, Andrew Bennett. To read the full article, click here.

Senior Editor Robert Joustra's September article on the Office of Religious Freedom was quoted in The Globe and Mail. To read the full article, click here.

On January 21st at 9:00 ET, www.OpenCanada.org—the online home of the Canadian International Council—will be hosting an online discussion on freedom of religion or belief and the future of Canada's Office of Religious Freedom. Discussion participants include: United Nations Special Rapporteur Heiner Bielefeldt Member of Parliament David Anderson Member of Parliament Scott Reid Dr. Malcolm Evans (Bristol) Dr. Nazila Ghanea-Hercock (Oxford) Dr. Janet Epp-Buckingham (Trinity Western) The discussion will be moderated by Robert Joustra (Cardus Policy in Public) To view the discussion, go to www.OpenCanada.org. Questions can be tweeted @TheCIC #CICFoRB.

Many Canadians on the left and right agree big is bad when it comes to business. So shouldn’t we be equally concerned that bloated labour unions will give the business to the working people who are their members? What, then, to make of the upcoming merger of the Canadian Auto Workers and the Communications, Energy and Paperworkers Union of Canada? The big event in labour for 2013, according to a fine article produced by The Canadian Press, will see two of Canada’s largest private sector unions combine. We knew it was coming, but will it be a good thing for Canadian labour? The CAW-CEP merger will further consolidate a Canadian union movement that is increasingly cannibalizing itself. Smaller unions are being gobbled up by larger unions, and the labour landscape is increasingly dominated by a few big unions. According to a recent government of Canada report on union coverage, “almost 50% of ... workers belong to just nine unions, each covering at least 100,000 workers.” As of this Labour Day, nine unions drops to eight unions. The report also notes that “at the other end of the spectrum, 162 unions having fewer than 10,000 members represent just eight per cent of workers.” Necessity is the mother of consolidation, apparently. The Conference Board of Canada’s State of the Unions in 2012 notes that “between 1997 and 2011, union density (the percentage of the total eligible workforce that is unionized) in Canada fell approximately 1.7 percentage points, from 30.9 per cent of the labour force to about 29.2 per cent. And union density in the private sector now sits at an all-time low of 15.9 per cent.” If you look further back in time, you’ll note that this is not a recent trend. Union density in the private sector is a leading indicator of the health of unions because it provides a glimpse into whether unions are successful in communicating their worth to the majority of the Canadian workforce. Who’s to blame for the long-term downward trend of union density in the private sector? The answer to this is twofold: There are both internal and external factors at play. The traditional narrative, of course, dwells on those external factors. The left blames union decline on big, bad corporations and (as the Canadian Union of Postal Workers’ constitution puts it) “their agent,” the government. Ken Lewenza, the national president of the Canadian Auto Workers, pays due homage to this line when he says, “This is a battle and I don’t see that changing in the near future because public policy mechanisms are being put in place to force workers to feel the uncertainty driven by the economy.” The right blames union decline on obsolescence: Changes in government policy (for example, minimum wage laws and maternity leave laws) and enlightened employers responding to market conditions make unions superfluous. There is some validity to both points, of course, but both also represent a failure to do what any institution facing long-term decline should do. That is, examine the internal factors at play. A look inward might reveal that a leading cause for union decline in Canada is embedded within the structures and philosophy of Canada’s labour movement. The class-struggle-based approach to labour sees politics rather than shop floor representation or industry issues as primary. Big unions, says Lewenza, “(give) us the tools to be more active politically.” This obsession prevents them from developing relationships with employers and industry associations that could lead to the innovative approaches to labour and capital that happen in, say, Germany, or even within small unions in Canada. The “tools” require unions to be bigger, so they can exert more political pressure. And they need to have a political party to use them. As a result, big unions act like big companies — just from a different side of the spectrum. In order to achieve this leverage, large unions adopt a monopolistic “one big union” approach to labour. Yet why would big unions be immune from the institutional results of all monopolies? Monopolies in the business world achieve groupthink rather than dissent, stagnation rather than innovation, and graft rather than accountability. How’s this for a revolutionary idea for union revival: Take a page off our own picket signs, and embrace small as beautiful.

The Cardus Construction Competitiveness Monitor is mentioned in the Daily Commercial News. The article discusses the effects of construction monopolies on Ontario taxpayers, as found in the report. To read the full article, click here .